by Eben Venter
After another minute or so, the boy comes in. He’s come straight from cricket practice, a second-team player. Jack shows Joey where to sit and puts him at ease by telling him a few things about his own life, and asks some questions too to loosen him up even more. They talk for more than an hour. No, Joey, put that out of your mind, he says when the boy seems to connect his sexual confusion with his relationship with his father, which was far from close.
Afterwards, in a spirit of deliberate indiscretion, he asks Joey if he can take a photo of the two of them. Joey says cool, and stands next to him with his white cricket shirt and his cream pullover with the two Zilverbosch-blue stripes bordering the V-neck. (Usually it’s the other way round, boys ask if they can take a photo of Mister Richie on their cameras.)
When Joey leaves, he boils some water for coffee and facebooks the photo of the chop to Matt, without any caption. What is there to say?
He takes a piece of shortbread from the cookie cupboard, sits down and facebooks Matt: Give me a week. If it doesn’t work out, yours truly moves out. Promise.
Bad coffee. The biscuit crumbles creamily in his mouth. Jamie comes scurrying into the staff room with Philippa, the history teacher, gets a fright when he sees him there, greets him half-heartedly, and deliberately chooses the other circle of chairs to sit down. The man doesn’t know how to behave.
When Dominee Roelf brings him back from oncology, Samantha is there to help him out of the car. She’s God’s blessing, that girl.
‘Look how they’ve mistreated poor Mister Bennie again.’ He lifts his head up to her, tears running down his cheeks. Salty water, that’s all, which he can no longer hold back. He hears it all – thank you and phone any time – somewhere above his head between Samantha and the dominee. Dominee Roelf, he may as well say it, is one of the old sort of Christians, very rare these days.
His back supported by Samantha’s arm, they walk together into the house. She has a tissue handy, which she uses to dry his cheeks. Tears they definitely are not. Once more, twice at most, he’ll have chemo, and after that, nothing. Professor de Lange said as much. Truth to tell, he’d expected it.
The oddest thing has happened to him. ‘Samantha?’
‘Yes, Mister Bennie?’
He can’t say what it is. It’s too odd for words. But he knows. He knows. After today’s session he experienced the sensation, the first time ever, of no longer being conscious of his own weight. Look, he was always stable at just over 90 kg, always kept his weight in check by jogging and going to the sea for a vigorous swim. Now he’s, ag, he can’t say it out loud. He thinks of himself as a dragonfly on a lily pad. Should he share this with a young person?
‘Samantha.’
‘Yes, Mister Bennie?’
‘I think take me to the toilet first, my girl.’
‘Okay, Mister Bennie.’
‘There’s nobody inside the house, is there, Samantha?’
‘How does Mister Bennie mean now?’
‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘Just leave it.’
Then she carefully directs Mister Bennie so that he can hold on to the toilet seat. He loosens his pyjama pants and lowers himself. ‘Nobody’s going to fool me,’ he mumbles.
He’ll have toast with Marmite, he says after being helped into bed a while later. When Samantha brings it, he doesn’t touch it. And when at last he does hold out a hand for it, the bread is rock hard. He feels the need to say a very specific thing to Mattie and he lies there thinking how best to say it. Mattie’s going to need advice now that he’s started his own business. He lies there, wondering how to get up and put on his slippers and get as far as the desk to make a recording.
He wakes up to the sound of Sannie’s voice coming in by the front door and walking up to him. The afternoon has already passed, he can sense it, and his body has still not taken on its weight. It’s as if there’s nothing lying in his bed. Samantha must have just about finished inside. She’ll come and say goodbye and then take a bus to her little house in Athlone. He says little house, but it’s a decent place. Spic and span. He’s been there several times. Old Mary. Shame, he really should leave her something in his will. He must get the attorney to come by.
‘Good Lord, Bennie. What have they done to you now? No, really, I’ll have to go and talk to Professor de Lange.’
‘What’s that, Sannie?’ He’s too tired for Sannie’s nonsense. He’ll have to call Samantha and tell her to show her out.
‘Finished, Bennie. Finished, finished, finished.’ She sails up to him, Sannie is always draped in a lot of cloth, he wouldn’t quite know what it is today. Her hand explores the bedspread so that she won’t sit on him, at least. Then up she gets onto the bed, with her hand on his arm.
He says nothing more and hopes his eyes don’t start watering again; Sannie will find it impossible not to take it as a blubbering. And he really doesn’t feel up to that. Why is Samantha not coming?
Sannie gets going on the thing she came for. She switches on a soppy voice like some of the dominees who don’t know how to be serious in their sermons without being sentimental. Decrepit as he is, she mustn’t think he doesn’t notice. Her hand is boiling hot, folded around his arm. Won’t keep him long, she says. She’s just quickly bringing the good news that Silver Cloud has duly handed over its donation to the Coronation Park people – she’s talking about the caravan people. Oh, and if only he could see the joy. All of them, apart from two stroppy gents, dedicated their lives to our Precious Lord, as Silver Cloud demands. ‘As you know, Bennie, it’s not a matter of handouts.’
He says nothing. Samantha will have to give him some of the Oramorph. His body has become a mere instrument for registering pain. Strange, the path the Lord wants you to walk on the final stretch.
She comes in. ‘Samantha?’ He lifts his hand, not the one under Sannie’s protection, and makes a gesture that he knows Samantha will understand. The girl is more attuned to his moods and things than old Mary was in those days.
‘Mrs Sannie, Mr Bennie is very tired. He should really rather be resting now.’ She comes and takes the woman by the arm.
‘My goodness, let go of me! I know my boundaries.’
‘Sannie,’ he murmurs.
She kisses him on the lips, a cloying rose fragrance that brings him no joy, and then pitter-patters out. Reaching the door, a parting shot: ‘You mustn’t let them treat me this way, Bennie. I’m one of your people, you know. Remember that.’
Shortly afterwards, Samantha brings his morphine and carefully helps him to sit up, with almost the same solicitude as Mattie, it’s just that with Mattie there’s something more in his touch, must be that he’s his own son. Then Samantha also says goodbye. He pays her by debit order directly into her savings account, there’s no problem on that score.
Once only and not again, he tries to get up, just halfway, and tries to plan the route ahead, each foot in a slipper, then the six paces to his chair, shuffle in, and then press Play on the Philips. He sees himself doing it, clear as daylight, almost more real than real life. But when he gets to the talking, speaking the right words where he knows the built-in microphone must be, he gets stuck. From that point on he can’t think ahead. Mattie. He can’t think how he wants to say this very specific thing to his son. There’s nothing but nonsense in his head. At first just a tiny bit, like a feeble stream. Then an eruption of all kinds of monstrosities and things that look as if they still need to be shaped, things that he’s never seen in all his life, and that he can’t distinguish from one another. Things that are nothing on earth to do with his words to Mattie. This makes him unhappy. There’s no direction any more in the overwhelming flood that he’s experiencing inside his head. He is inside it, irredeemably, a Benjamin Duiker he can make neither head nor tail of.
‘Is that you, Sis?’
‘Now who else would it be, Pappie?’
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br /> ‘I’m so glad you’re phoning, my child.’
‘Pappie, I can’t talk, I must rush to fetch the kids in town. Ballet and stuff. I just wanted to ask, does Pappie know that Uncle Hannes gave Matt his Beretta? Do you know about this business?’
‘Mattie mentioned something like that, yes.’
‘Oh, well, then that’s all right. I just wanted to make sure. No, I suppose there’s no problem then. Marko and I were wondering, because Uncle Hannes has never had that weapon relicensed. I don’t want Matt to pick up trouble with that thing. That’s all, really. I must run. Love you lots, Pappie.’
‘Yes, my child.’
In the first three weeks or so, when he arrives at his business in the morning, parks behind the premises across the way from the laundry, walks round the corner with his rucksack – Uncle Hannes’s Beretta still untouched in its dassie-hide pouch – unlocks Duiker’s Takeaway and lights the gas flames one by one, he experiences an increased sensual awareness, a high. All he can compare it with was before Jack’s time, when he used to take a weekly trip out to Kalk Bay, in the afternoons it was, and called up from the street to his fuck buddy – who came out onto the balcony, wearing only a vest – and then walked up the stairs and entered the bedroom where the bed had been prepared with all the paraphernalia, such as condoms and lubricant and a few toys and cigarettes, all that stuff strewn over the bed, ready for use in the purple and red bubble light of a single lava lamp, and then it comes on, like a fit, a throbbing sensation in every fibre of your body.
But something else gets added to the mix, something he’s never experienced before. It’s as if he’s entered another sphere, one of survival, where he’s acting beyond the limits of his body’s abilities. The constant standing on his feet, the carrying to and fro of heavy saucepans, keeping track of the number of orders (any over-ordering of fresh vegetables or meat, and he’s had it), keeping track of recipes, of seasoning and tasting (he reaches a stage where he takes a spoonful of sauce and tastes it, and then tastes it again and again, without knowing any longer whether the flavour’s okay), keeping his humour and patience with customers, his enthusiasm (fuck) in describing the food when he sees someone hesitating, the pain in his arse then, the faint trembling of his hand around a glass of Coke when, at about three or four o’clock in the afternoon, he has a chance to sit down.
And then getting up again for the chunk of beef that still has to be cubed and marinated in his curry mix (nicely spiked with extract of tamarind), the job itself energises him, and there at the counter another customer already: a mother with her two children in white school shirts: good afternoon, Madam, and he’s switched on, in gear, and remains like that, just like that, right through the afternoon as he sells someone a container of lentil dahl, or some chicken curry to the next customer, every one of his muscles and senses primed.
Between customers, and with his preparation for the next day under control or at least planned according to a sequence, Mattheüs looks out over the counter and over Main all the way to the Groote Schuur Hospital tower and even further up to Table Mountain with its wind-blown pines, and the sight makes him think of his mother, he doesn’t know why – if she could only see him now. His mother sitting next to him with his clasped hands, feeding him the words of the children’s prayer in a voice that he’s learnt to recognise as her night voice. On his boy’s knees, he is then with his mother and gentle Jesus – at the deepest level it’s a matter of that all-embracing security. And maybe that’s what made him think of his mother. If Pa goes tomorrow or next week, and Jack also decides to push off, and all other safety nets disappear, then he’ll know at least that he’s made it, competent and capable, here at Duiker’s Takeaway with his Italian apron. He’ll keep standing on the perforated spongy plastic carpets among his pots that are like pals, his cold-room meter on a safe five degrees C, here he’ll hold the fort, his eye on the passers-by on the pavement: is this my kind of customer or not? That’s how powerfully he experienced his new business in those first three weeks.
When he and Jack arrive home, Jack lying flat on his seat in case of prying eyes over the fence, he first goes to the study and takes Pa’s hand in his. Pa is calm, there are no problems. Mattheüs keeps his mobile phone in his pocket all day, ready for any emergency calls. He notes a contentment in his father that in the early phases of his illness was variable in nature and has now become complete. Either he’s accepted that his death is very close, or, so Mattheüs would like to believe, he’s terribly grateful that his son has at last found his feet and he no longer needs to worry about him.
He tells his father about the wheat farmer from the Caledon area who came to buy food from him, Francois was his name. In town for shopping. A bit skimpy on the meat, but tasty, he said about the lamb stew. So he fished out an extra chunk of meat from the pot and put it on top of Francois’s helping, keep the customer satisfied.
If he added more meat, he’d have to push up the price, he tells his father. Pa’s eyes mist over with a smile, tears trail from the corners of his eyes. ‘My son,’ say his lips voicelessly. Mattheüs carefully folds back his father’s lips (at the end of each day he cleans his mouth with sterile soap), and inserts one of the dry-mouth suckers. In his last conversation with Professor de Lange – and may he just once more say how little he appreciates the man’s pietistic way of treating his father – he said they could try chemo one more time, but he thinks the possible benefits of such treatment are minimal at this stage.
‘The organs have all had it, not so, Professor? It’s the chemo that’s going to kill him, not the lymphoma?’ Professor de Lange, horribly thin-lipped, gratefully took out his mobile phone that was ringing in his pocket and took the call, and Mattheüs walked out of his dirty-pink-and-grey consulting room without a goodbye from either of them.
When, that day, Francois the wheat farmer had finished his stew, wiped his mouth and left – he provides serviettes made from grey recycled paper, only one per person, please – he immediately got going on his kitchen routine, and with a special spoon he scooped lentils from the drum to be soaked for the next day. He skims from the top, he’s chosen the lentil drum to hide his Beretta. He keeps it in the dassie-hide pouch, he doesn’t really want a lentil to creep up the barrel, you never know with these things.
Like an oiled machine just made for this work, is how he thinks of himself after only a week. (Though the piles of invoices pushed under the steel door do shake him up; quick calculation on his calculator, is he in the red yet?) Outside of his routine, or in it, and even while he’s serving customers, there is always the furtive burning in his head, manifesting itself either as a blinking in his eye or as a twitching in his crotch, the craving for an hour or even less if necessary, as he’d got used to before Duiker’s, to delve into his porn archive and give himself what his brain is asking for.
But opening his computer and searching for his porn sites isn’t the same any more. It’s between the two of them, him and his computer, and with Jack around there’s one too many. Jack in the evenings there in his bedroom, fooling around on Facebook in his underpants – strange how his desire then closes in on him. How he repeatedly returns to Jack in his bedroom and on his bed. Maybe the time has come to rein in his pleasuring, even to shake it off, he whispers to himself. But does he want to? That’s the question.
Sometimes Emile comes sauntering along to Duiker’s, some days he doesn’t see him at all. He suspects he chooses his days and times carefully, and then again he thinks no, he’s labelling the guy. Emile is an impoverished Congolese refugee intent on survival, he’s only human, he’s doing what anyone in his situation would do. Also, none of the cheek of his previous visits, only happy smiles. And when he comes, he always ties his dog up two posts further along the pavement, as Mattheüs requested: ‘You’re going to scare off my customers with that monster.’ From his pants pocket he produces a pair of two-rand coins, never anything more than t
hat, which he uses to buy food. Mattheüs dishes up half a container, that’s the most he can give. Emile squats right there and devours the food in an instant, and Mattheüs, who can’t help watching from the corner of his eye, gives him the job of emptying the rubbish bags into the bins behind the shop in exchange for another helping. But Mattheüs doesn’t allow him inside – Emile so eager – rather carries the bags to the other side of the steel door to be taken away from there.
One day, when Emile comes back after dumping rubbish again, he’s eating something with his hands, out of a cut-off Coke bottle. Mattheüs notices that it’s the last of the fermented lentil dahl that he’d had to throw out. He tells Emile it’ll make him sick, but he eats everything he’s got right there, he doesn’t mind. Why does Mattheüs’s cheapest food cost eight rand, while here at the back you can do a load of laundry for seven rand, he wants to know. Mattheüs explains how a business works. If your expenditure exceeds your income, you’re buggered. Does he understand that? And dishes him up another half-container of food for the job he’s done. Well, it seems Mattheüs has forgotten he’d told him he used to own a restaurant in Boma, he and his brother. On the beach on the west coast of the DRC. He knows everything about business.
‘I also have to make a living,’ Mattheüs tells him. What does he think it costs to establish a takeaway?
He’s just saying, says Emile. Just saying. He doesn’t want to make Matthew angry. He has a wife with trois enfants at home. Then he politely says goodbye, and once again gives a wave over his shoulder as he walks off.
The incident leaves Mattheüs troubled. And it’s not about Emile, who he’s really not scared of. (He tells himself.) Rather about the disintegration of his brief sense of security, the one that made him recall his mother.